First TFS 2015 RC production upgrade I know of

I got the first customer report of a production upgrade to the TFS 2015 release candidate today. Understand, we haven’t released it yet but we gave an early copy to our MVPs to give us final feedback on. One of our MVPs reported that he upgraded a customer with a 9GB team project collection (not terribly large, obviously), and that it took 11 minutes.

I was happy to hear that it was both successful and reasonably fast. This release has a lot of database changes to support Team Project rename and other things so, for large databases, we expect the upgrade times will be significant. To mitigate that, we have created a “pre-upgrade” tool that will make most of the schema changes while your server is still online and available and only require you to shut it down for the final schema updates. In my opinion, only customers with pretty large systems (hundreds of gigs or more) likely need to go that path. Anyone can, it won’t hurt, but not everyone needs to.

Anyway, just thought I’d share a little good news for the day. The RC will be broadly available before too long so stay tuned for more info.

With the release of the RC, will you also publish a preview of the documentation? Some articles like msdn.microsoft.com/…/dd578592.aspx (System requirements for Team Foundation Server) would be helpful to be published earlier, so we can get our systems ready, especially for multi-server environments.

4 years ago

PeterSonnek

We did a test upgrade from TFS 2012 update 2 to TFS 2015 CTP1. Our default collection was around 350 GB and it only took two hours to upgrade. Obviously that doesn't include some of the latest changes with Team Project rename but we were encouraged by the speed compared to our previous upgrades (which is partially why we're still on 2012).

@russweb, If you use VS Online (visualstudio.com), then you are always on the latest version. Most of the currently available TFS 2015 features are already turned on there. If you want to try TFS 2015 on premises, then you can either try the CTP we shipped a few months ago or wait for the Release Candidate that will be available soon.

Brian

4 years ago

Peter Toonen

Just did a production upgrade on a reasonably sized collection: 345GB, so far no issues and only took about 1 hour.

They are only available to MVPs at the moment. Everyone else will get them soon. MVPs help us validate the final build before we unleash it on everyone. It's important. In fact, we found a ship stopping, data loss bug last week and had to do a very quick fix. The scenario was very narrow so it would be extremely unlikely to affect a given customer. We found it could affect about 7 out of over 1 million on VS Online. None-the-less, we stopped the build, looked for any possible similar bugs, validated and respun a build. With getting it right as important as it is, we have an involved process before we distribute it widely.

@MichaelHauer – yes, new docs will start appearing in the near future. We will try to get an updated version of the system requirements page near the beginning of the queue there. There are not many changes from the requirements for TFS 2013, however, so you are quite likely to be in good shape already. Feel free to reach out to me (aaronha@microsoft.com) if you have specific questions in the short term.

We will have Agents SKU available as part of RC release, Test Automation Runs functionality will be available with Visual Studio Online first. We will be posting the details with a blog once the Visual Studio Online bits are deployed and available.

4 years ago

@ScottA

At a customer throuh a MVP. Don't have the bits myself unfortunately 🙂

At the very bottom of that page are live links to the release candidate. If you want a version other than Enterprise or Community, click on the "Visual Studio 2015" blue link for a drop-down to other versions.

Sorry if I ninja'd you, Brian.

4 years ago

Greg Roberts

Hi Harry

I had the 2015 CTP installed, saw nothing in bold letters about 2015 CTP install issues.

TFS 2015 RC install (on top of CTP) went smoothly but config did not, i.e. upgrade not possible for 2015 CTP DB.

@Betty, the preupgrade tool isn't availably yet. We just made it available to our MVPs to do some early testing. We'll make it more widely available as soon as we get some validation that it works fine outside our walls.

Brian

4 years ago

Fergal Sweeney

Just tried an upgrade to 2015 with our Live TFS data on a sandbox and I'm getting an interesting error on our primary collection:

[2015-05-12 19:48:17Z][Error] The time zone ID 'Belarus Standard Time' was not found on the local computer.

Now we do have a team of folks using the system from Belarus so not as strange and random as it might appear:-)

@getterdone, No. The pre-upgrade tool only works on TFS 2013.4 (I should have mentioned that). You first have to upgrade to that release – which if you are close is pretty fast and easy. Then you can use the pre-upgrade tool to do the 2015 upgrade.

Brian

4 years ago

ramon

comota toqu crido

3 years ago

Andrew Fisher

Any more news on the upgrade tool?

We did a test environment upgrade to 2015 RC from 2013.4 and it took 10 hours to upgrade 5 collections, two of which are over 250GB

@Andrew, We haven't released the pre-upgrade tool yet. We tested it on one of our largest internal production servers a couple of weeks ago and discovered a race condition between it and active load on the server that caused a "bad upgrade". Unfortunately fixing it also requires changes in TFS itself so we can't release it until we have a new build of TFS 2015 available. We've got the fixes in place now and are doing a round of internal/MVP testing to validate it before making everything public.

Brian

3 years ago

Colin F

Any updates on when the power tools will be available for 2015? Thanks

@Colin, our current expectation is that we'll ship the Power Tools a couple of weeks after TFS 2015 RTM.

Brian

3 years ago

Gary Nguyen

Brian,

It fails with some sql errors when we try upgrade from TFS 2012 Update 4 for to TFS 2015RC. I would believe this is the supported upgrade path since, I bet, a lot of customers are still in TFS2012 but not TFS2013 because there are not much between them.

It's a testing in sandbox and it's a roadblock going to PROD. Our database is huge (2TB+), and it's take almost 22 hrs upgrade from 2010 to 2012 in the past. The servers are on 2008 R2 SP1 and SQL server 2012 SP1

I am sorry that you are having difficulties with upgrade to TFS 2015 RC and thanks a lot for reporting the issue. I replied to your post on forums. Please contact me via e-mail if solution that I suggested does not work for you.

Thanks,

–Vladimir

3 years ago

Scotty

We successfully updated our system to TFS 2015 RC. I do have a question about the July release of TFS 2015. Will we have to remove the TFS 2015 RC before proceeding with the July version of TFS 2015? I just want to ask for the sake of planning purposes… Thanks in advance.